"Let go of me, you lump of rock." Chainer jerked his arm back, but Kamahl didn't let go. He clamped onto the artificial limb with the other hand and steadied himself on his feet.
"I'm sorry, Chainer," he said, and channeled a withering blast of heat from his own body into Chainer's arm.
The metal limb instantly became red-hot, and Chainer screamed. He dropped the Mirari and drew his dagger, stabbing it into Kamahl's forearm, once, twice, a half dozen times. Kamahl grimly held on through it all, pumping more heat and more energy through his hands.
Chainer's arm melted into slag with a wet, angry hiss. He fell backward and lashed his foot out at Kamahl, finally knocking the barbarian onto his back. "That was a gift from Skellum," Chainer hissed. "Can't you barbarians lay off my thrice-damned arm?" He kicked Kamahl in the ribs as he stepped over his prone body to retrieve the Mirari. He took the sphere in his remaining hand, closed his eyes, and concentrated. The smoking end of his stump started to swell, and a new arm began to unfold like an inflating balloon. It wasn't Chainer's arm, or any human's. It was a thin, segmented claw like an insect's, and Chainer looked at it in confusion.
"That's not right," he said. The insect claw vanished, and in its place a large, black rattlesnake sprouted. Chainer scowled at it until it withered. Another attempt produced a mewling, eyeless monstrosity that wailed like a baby until Chainer shook it away.
"Chainer, what's happening?"
"I don't know," he said. What was happening? How could the Mirari keep failing?
Unless he had overtaxed it. Of course. He had been communing with the sphere for days, actively using it for the past half hour, and then had simply cast it aside. Of course it was malfunctioning, he wasn't using it properly. He ought to have pulled himself out of the sphere's bottomless well of power before he tried to do something else. Also, it was probably mad at him for abandoning it.
"Chainer, wait."
"Shush." Chainer absently flicked his arm toward the helpless barbarian, and a torrent of misshapen snakes and monsters swamped Kamahl where he lie.
Chainer tried one final time to make himself an arm, but it came out as a lifeless and callused roll of flesh. Nearby, Kamahl was grappling with the tangle of horrors and losing. Chainer shook his head. That wouldn't do. He had promised Kamahl a fair fight.
In fact, the entire building was getting too noisy and crowded. Chainer needed peace and quiet to kill his friend, and he held the Mirari up to help him get it.
"Chainer," Kamahl gurgled from the bottom of the pile. "Don't."
"Hold on," Chainer said. "I'm almost done." With the sphere in his hand, he once again felt all of the minds he had broken into and pillaged, all of them still frozen and empty. Instead of reaching into those minds, this time Chainer reached out into the world. The other dementists were merely relay stations for his dementia space now, and there was no reason to give back what he had rightfully stolen. He wanted to finish Kamahl man to man, however, and for that he needed quiet.
Chainer used the Mirari to locate each and every one of the monsters he had unleashed since the games began. He was surprised how many of them were left. In fact, there were very few people left alive in the arena around him, and the monsters there had turned on each other. All the more reason to call them home, he thought. The battle's nearly over, and we've already won.
All around Otaria, the flow of power reversed as a million nightmares began to flow back into the fragmented brain that created them.
"This kind of hurts," Chainer said. "Is it supposed to hurt?"
Buried by hostile monsters, Kamahl was helpless to stop Chainer. He watched the Cabalist as the Mirari sent blasts of light out in all directions, and then a thousand smaller beams began flowing back into Chainer's body.
"This kind of hurts," Chainer said. "Is it supposed to hurt?" "Drop it, Chainer!" Kamahl tried to yell more, but something with hooves instead of fists punched him in the mouth.
The swarm of monsters stopped tearing at him as the lights beaming into Chainer began to grow larger, faster, and more frequent. Kamahl was still unable to move, but at least he wasn't being damaged any further.
Chainer was screaming now. They were no longer merely beams of light slamming into him, but elongated streamers of flesh, eyes, fangs, stingers, and claws. Not just energy, but mass was pouring into him, and his physical form was not prepared to deal with it. In a final burst of triumphant, agonizing sound, the air around Chainer's body imploded and a flash of purple light blew outward, knocking stones loose from the wall and almost reburying Kamahl in rubble.
Many silent minutes passed. Then Kamahl broke the silence by shoving one of the larger stones off of his chest and letting it crash loudly to the floor. The barbarian painfully got to his feet and limped down the hall to where Chainer writhed. At first Kamahl thought his friend was coated in some kind of undulating ooze, but as he looked closer, he saw the truth. It wasn't something on Chainer's body that squirmed, it was Chainer's body. Though he still had the same build and the same shape, Chainer's arms, legs, chest, head, even his hair was now a turbulent mass of wriggling monsters. Tiny eyes looked up at Kamahl, and miniature fangs formed, struck, then melted again. Sometimes a head or a hand would rise above the surface of his skin, and snakes swam all through the unstable flesh like sharks in a feeding frenzy. His nose and mouth were only shapes, and those shapes were crammed full of tongues and scales and fingers and talons. Even his missing arm had been replaced with the cancer of living monsters.
Worst of all were his eyes. Chainer's brilliant blue eyes had returned, and they bore mute and tragic testimony to the agony he suffered.
The Mirari had rolled free and sat unobtrusively on the floor. It seemed smaller and drab, its eerie black glow extinguished. Kamahl marveled that he and so many others had fought and bled for something that appeared to be nothing more than a spent cannonball, or a discarded child's toy. He knelt down next to Chainer.
The hideous parody of his friend's body reacted to his closeness, and Chainer clumsily flopped a boneless arm toward Kamahl's hand. Kamahl took it, and he fought the urge to release the hideous squirming thing and start hacking it with his sword. Chainer pulled on Kamahl's arm, and the barbarian leaned forward to put his ear next to the place that had been Chainer's mouth.
"Mu. Ra. Ree."
Kamahl had no idea how the sound was created, but he understood. He shook his head. "You don't need it. It'll only make things worse."
Chainer shook his head, his eyes pleading. He tried to point at it with his free arm.
"Yours. Take. You. Take it."
"I'm not so sure I want it anymore."
Chainer's horrid grip grew tighter. "Must," he gurgled. "Not. Safe." "All right, Chainer. I'll take it, and I'll keep it safe." A hundred battles had taught him not to argue with a dying man.
Chainer's grip relaxed. "Sorry," he said. "So sorry."
Kamahl held his friend's hand until the squirming stopped and his ragged breath stopped completely. He stood, remembering the simple courtesy he had paid to dead enemies and allies alike. In this case, it was the least he could do to free Chainer's spirit from the hideous form it had been shackled to.